Mohamed Lamine Gakou here gives an overview of the
'agricultural question' in contemporary Africa. This is a
difficult task if the writer wishes both to respect the variety
of situations on this vast continent and avoid the detailed
juxtaposition of case studies, both to spare the reader the
jargon of specialists and remain brief without lapsing into
superficiality. But it is a task in which the author has
succeeded.

Africa's agricultural failure - this continent is the only one
in which per capita agricultural production is falling - is
certainly widely recognized, but the explanations for it remain
generally partial and contradictory. Does the distant past
(precolonial Africa (Chapter 2)) bear some share of
responsibility? If there is a 'specificity' - over and beyond
their great variety - in the modes of organization of the rural
areas of most of Africa, it is probably that the still virtually
untouched communal or tribute-paying forms involved an extensive
occupation of the land. This made possible a much higher level of
food self-sufficiency than is often supposed thanks to a
relatively high labour productivity (which went hand in hand with
very low yields per hectare). A higher per capita production
demands the shift to intensive modes calling for a considerably
higher overall quantity of annual labour. This increase in per
capita production is thus accompanied by a lower productivity of
labour (of physical production per 'day' of labour) but also by a
higher yield per hectare. The shift to intensive agriculture, the
sine qua non of any development worthy of the name, constitutes
the challenge that the African peoples will pick up.

But the challenge has not yet been picked up. Colonization not
only failed to pick it up; it never set out to do so. It was
easier for it, as Gakou shows (Chapter 3), to secure an immediate
super-profit at no cost (involving no investment) by forcing the
peasants of Africa to perform unpaid - or very poorly paid -
surplus labour through forms of indirect control (Chapter 6). A
slightly higher per capita production at the price of rather more
work, without machines, or modern inputs (but destroying the soil
of Africa), combined with a deterioration in the conditions of
peasant life were enough to elicit a considerable profit for the
capital dominating the global system. Colonization thus continued
the old tradition of the slave trade; exploitation by pillage
that guaranteed neither the long-term reproduction of the labour
force, nor the reproduction of the natural conditions of
production.

Independence did not alter this mode of integration into the
world capitalist system. As Gakou shows (Chapter 4), independence
came in response to the demands of the new stage of the
globalization of capital (the rebuilding of Europe and the
hegemony of the United States) and not in response to the African
peasant problem. Moreover, the prosperity of the 1960s in the
West led in Africa to a new euphoria for the 'extroverted system'
- that system oriented to export markets. And while, courageously
and clear-sightedly, René Dumont, ever sensitive to the peasant
question, denounced the 'false start in Africa', the World Bank,
which today weeps crocodile tears over the fate of the peasants
(while its counterpart the International Monetary Fund makes the
poorest foot the bill for the bankruptcy) sustained with
overwhelming enthusiasm the policies that ten years later were to
lead to catastrophe.

The crisis of the 1970s and 1980s results from the combined
effects of the over-exploitation of the land and of men and
women, raised to a level that can be raised no more, and the
crisis engulfing the capitalist system as a whole. Faced with
this the proposals that rain down on Africa at an ever increasing
rate are scarcely anything more than the expression of the 'quest
for palliatives', as Gakou shows (Chapter 5).

If it is only a matter of palliatives, it is because the
'pro-agriculture' talk nurtured by the media in the West is
contrasted with an alleged 'preference for industrialization'
which is said to be the source of the bankruptcy. For the reason
for seeking greater output per farmer is precisely in order to
make possible a higher degree of urbanization. But urbanization
without industrialization cannot but be parasitical and
disastrous. Conversely, industry (but not just any industry) is
necessary to make greater agricultural output possible: it has to
supply it with machinery and offer it a growing market in return.
That is what the option for an autocentred national and popular
strategy means. If this option is rejected in favour of a
systematic preference for integration into globalization (i.e.,
the world capitalist economy), talk of giving priority to
agriculture becomes hollow and at worst demagogic. The World Bank
Berg Report1 has these characteristics, refraining as
it does from making a self-criticism of the Bank which supported
the policies that led to the present bankruptcy, refraining from
making a critique of import-substitution industrialization (which
finds its preferred market in the expansion of demand from the
middle classes at the expense of the rural and urban popular
classes) which it advocated, and refraining from analyzing the
implications of its proposal for export-oriented industry. But
this derives its 'comparative advantage' from its low wages,
which it thus contributes to reproducing. The contradictions of
these 'proposals' are moreover obvious: export-oriented industry
presupposes low wages and consequently, low food prices, at the
very time that the raising of these latter to inspire the
peasants to produce more is being recommended.

The populist dress that MacNamara, when he was President of
the World Bank, gave these proposals does not alter their
implications. The themes of 'basic needs' and the strategy of
'family smallholdings' analysed by Gakou scarcely conceal the
worst choice scenario which unfortunately some confused sections
of the Western left have confused with the popular interest. In
any case, these oratorical flourishes have never prevented
Western 'aid' agencies from giving de facto preference to
support for agri-business and the kulaks - in the name of
efficiency. The fact that these policies continue to be advocated
in the West testifies basically to the lack of seriousness with
which Africa is treated. In fact, Africa, in the imperialist
vision of the world, is above all for the West a source of
mineral resources. Neither its industrialization nor its
agricultural development are thus really taken seriously.2

Nothing in nature ordains that African agriculture should be
impoverished. Doubtless the under-population of tropical Africa
(compared with the dense population of tropical Asia) constitutes
an obstacle to intensification which calls for major internal
population movements. And whatever has been said, the Sahel
itself is not 'poor'. Here there is water (a series of rivers
whose flow is equal to that of the Nile, exceptional underground
water layers, according to studies that have been kept secret3),
sources of energy (is not uranium one of these sources? And the
sun? And oil less than a thousand metres down?), land suitable
for cultivation, and people. A social system that proves itself
incapable of co-ordinating these 'factors' in a satisfactory plan
able to feed the people involved does not deserve to be described
as rational. Let us recognize then that the capitalist system is
not rational since it does not necessarily guarantee the
reproduction of the labour force in each of its segments. Here,
in the Sahel, for capitalism such as it is, it is the existence
of the Sahelian peoples that is 'irrational'. For this
capitalism, things would be more profitable if there was only
uranium in the Sahel and no useless Sahelians. Such is the logic
of the world system for which Africa is still exclusively a
source of raw materials. From their endless stress on emergency
'relief' distributions, Western and European institutions have
created the impression that the Sahel was irrevocably condemned.
Thus we see a certain progressive institution accept as
self-evident, in a study of 'energy prospects' for the region,
that since uranium is not intended for the 'natives', the
Sahelians must be taught better ways of gathering brushwood in
the desert and how not to waste it in Malagasy stoves! So let
Africa adapt itself to the wastefulness of the West. Is there a
better expression of the fate as mineral supplier to which
imperialism consigns the continent and of the subordination of
all so-called development programmes to this essential logic than
this naive acceptance of the 'imperatives' of exporting the
energy resources of the region? But why not the opposite; why
should not Africa recover control and use of its resources, and
Europe adjust itself to that?

The capacity of capitalism in the abstract to 'solve the
problem of African development' could be discussed ad
infinitum. Concrete capitalism, such as it actually exists,
that is, globalized, not only has not 'solved' this problem (it
even created it) over the last 150 years (or even over the last
400 years since the slave trade), but envisages nothing for the
next 50 years. The challenge will therefore only be taken up by
the African peoples, the day that the necessary popular alliances
enable them to delink their development from the demands of
transnationalization.

Samir Amin

Notes

1. For a critique of this World Bank report, see Samir Amin,
'Une stratégie de développement autocentrée est-elle possible
pour l'Afrique?'; Kwame Amoa, 'Some problems of autocentered
development in Africa'.

2. Faycal Yachir, The Struggle over Africa's Minerals: What
is at stake?, forthcoming in this series.

3. Explanatory notes and planning maps for the exploitation of
the underground waters in the Sahel, Bureau de recherche
géologique et minimânt, 1975.